The big question–were they making s’mores?
The first anole paper of 2015 is a doozy. Everyone loves to roast marshmallows around a campfire. Turns out that “everyone” includes crested anoles, A. cristatellus! Read all about it in the paper by Norman Greenhawk in the new journal Life: the Excitement of Biology.
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
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Skip Lazell
I believe the term is correctly spelled “marshmellowsivory” — a diagnostic trait of the genus Anolis.
Kurt Schwenk
This is interesting, but the author is incorrect in concluding that “this is the first record of an anole consuming a human-manufactured food item.” There is the classic (to some) case of the “chuckles” experiment conducted on Malpelo Island (Columbia) by Rand, Gorman & Rand (1975) (“Natural history, behavior, and ecology
of Anolis agassizi”). Chuckles were a kind of brightly colored, jelly candy popular back in the day. They showed that the lizards preferred yellow and orange chuckles over red, green and black. The anoles consumed all they were offered.
The paper is part of a compilation on investigations of Malpelo Island published by the Smithsonian and it is available for download here:
http://www.sil.si.edu/SmithsonianContributions/Zoology/pdf_hi/SCTZ-0176.pdf
Martha Muñoz
An experiment for color preference (based on the Chuckles experiment on Malpelo) later became part of a great prank in the Losos Lab.